In general, a printer includes a printer engine that performs printing based on print data and a print control apparatus that controls the printer engine. (To be precise, controllers other than above mentioned are also included.)
Also, a print control apparatus having a large capacity memory has been conventionally proposed (e.g. refer to Japanese Laid-Open Patent application No. 05-27929, Japanese Laid-Open Patent application No. 09-240070 and Japanese Laid-Open Patent application No. 11-191041).
A print control apparatus having a large capacity memory as described obtains, from an outside host computer and the like, print data indicating sentences and figures to be printed, and stores the print data in the large capacity memory, while it allows a printer engine to execute printing by which contents indicated by the print data are printed.
The print control apparatus can hereby reprint the print contents such as sentences and figures that have been printed in advance, using the print data stored in the large capacity memory. In other words, when a user reprints the previously printed contents, the user does not need an operation of transmitting, from a host computer to the printer, the print data that indicates the print contents. Therefore, the printer can easily perform printing in a short time.
Here, the conventional print control apparatus includes, besides the large capacity memory, a display unit for displaying operation contents, setting contents and the like, an operation unit having an operation button used by a user and a control unit for controlling the display unit and the large capacity memory.
The control unit allows the display unit to display job names indicating each print data stored in the large capacity memory in a list format. If the user operates the operation unit and selects a desired job name from the list displayed on the display unit when such list is displayed, the operation unit notifies the control unit of the selected job name. Note that the job name is a print processing name for the print data.
The control unit then reads out the print data corresponding to the notified job name from the large capacity memory and allows the printer engine to print the print contents indicated in the print data.
Additionally, the display area in the print control apparatus, in general, is relatively small and the number of letters displayed is limited, so that it cannot display a whole list of job names if the amount of held print data is large. In that case, a method for displaying job names in sequence according to an operation by a scroll button and the like in the operation unit is used to solve the problem. Also, the display unit displays the list by each part according only to a predetermined order. That is, the control unit assigns a number to each print data for managing the each print data stored in a large capacity memory and allows the display unit to display the list in an order according to the management numbers.
However, in the conventional print control apparatus, the list of job names is displayed to the display unit according to the order for managing each print data. Therefore, in the case where a large amount of print data is stored in the large capacity memory, it takes time for a user to find a desired job name in the list. In other words, it takes time for the user to find the desired print data among the print data stored in the large capacity memory so that there is a problem of unusability.
Accordingly, the present invention is available to solve the above mentioned problem and it is an object of the present invention to provide a print control apparatus and a print control method with increased convenience by making retrieval of stored print data easy and fast.